


Down in the Valley

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Accountants, Brotherly Love, Desert, Episode: s02e15 Tall Tales, Ghosts, Gunslingers, Hope, Los Angeles, Mark of Cain, Marks, Massage, Muscles, Season/Series 10, Sunsets, and lost souls, city of angels, ex-strippers, stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-03-29 15:45:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3901867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A haunted massage parlor, mirrors, muscle memory, LA confidential, and don’t they just want to see the sunset.</p>
<p>A body's worth of wrath, or love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Down in the Valley

_"…could have been...beautiful, alive, auburns, strands, soft-earth mouth; irides streamwater shining;warm in the bones, spruce, resins, amber, bark of birch; the faintest hit of asphalt, sea --"_

"She wrote that about you?" Dean says, turns the dead novelist's laptop, password-cracked, around in his hands, mouth quirking like a hairpin, "really?"

"Jesus." Sam's turned carnation he’d guess, just ordinary pink, pinked edges, round the ears, "I don't think so."

"Who else," Dean says, "it's dated the day you  _interviewed_ her. This is her diary, you know, her journal thing. Really, spruce?"

"Jesus," Sam says, heads for the bathroom to splash his face.

Dean's laughter, undercurrent running, follows him down, past the Victoriana (incongruous in this bungalow, this canyon), the silver-framed family photos. Islands.

"I think she was possessed," he yells from over the seashelled sink, looks at his flush-faced reflection and the scrapes on his hands and the little burn-scars waypointing his forearms. Ah, shit.

The asphalt part is true.

*****

They spent, laughing about it, two days in the Valley.

A haunted massage parlor, the Inland Empire, an air conditioner that nearly gave Dean a herniation, palms, too much light, oh god the 5, the Santa Monica Freeway, a six-way angle-cross, the worst intersection in all of LA, and don't they just want to hit the coast, watch the sun sinker itself in the Pacific.

A haunted massage parlor the novelist was making a book of.

"I so wasn't going to make a happy ending joke," Dean said.

"Yes you were."

“OK I was.”

It’s good to hear him laugh, not so gallows.

*****

Is gorgeous here except when it isn’t, which is a lot. Brassy sky, scented oil, sort-of silk.

Facedown, Sam says, oh god.

“That hurt?” the massage therapist says, digging at a trap. Joseph, he said, altar boy who fled Pittsburgh at fifteen, went west for destiny.

“You have no idea.”

Not his idea of an interview, but it’s working; they’re talking; they’ll clear the place of spirits in a day and hit the skids, take their muscle-memories on the ghosttown road.

“Got a lot of heartbreak right here,” Joseph says. (Donkey-ligaments, bleached in the sun. Prickly-pear asterisms in the fascia.)

“Uh,” Sam says, “yeah.” (He doesn’t smell like resins, or anything else woodsy-fragrant; just, you know, sorrow and its sublimations, essences, top notes lifted off, gone.) Opt for half-truth.

“Tried to win someone’s heart. Or, um, save them. You know, lost.”

"Oh man, you can't  _win_  someone's heart."

“Yeah?”

"Wrong metaphor.” Joe’s on a roll about hearts and hamstrings, hauntings. "Save, maybe, " he says. His hands go slow. Sam’s kept most of his clothes on. Too many tells.

“Hmm,” Joe says, takes a fingerful of scalene and plucks, strokes, “what a wreck.”

It isn’t an expansion-era madam, no wayward daughter of joy, haunting the place, though the novelist might have gone that way. It’ll only take one midnight to salt away the accountant with the terrible prospects, deadman before he hit the city limits, though of course he didn’t know it.

“We all came out here looking for paydirt,” Joe says, “and why not?” He smells faintly of campfire.

Ever been possessed, is what Sam thinks, and then, what? Joe’s thumbs make him gasp.

Dean meets him at the front after, looking tense and not a little ill, rubbing restive at his forearm.

“Your luck’s gonna turn,” Joe says, not too quiet for them both to hear; he means heartwise.

“Please,” an ex-stripper named Janna says, not too quiet for them both to hear, leans in and spans the brotherspace with her hands, “ain't nobody gonna get inside that."

(Inked arms she caught Sam looking at, turned them at the ulnas and winked, "Nagari, Sanskrit, 'The Virgin', 'Full of Sins'.")

"Thought so," Sam said.

“Think we can solve your little accounting problem,” Dean says, smiles.

*****

What, after all, is beauty. Go for truth and I’ll throttle you.

Sam thinks: though it is, it is.

*****

Dean goes for honest and faceplants. In the motel, West Toluca Lake,  _faux_ -tawdry, he swipes at the steamed mirror, towels his hair, jingles a pocketed something like the keys to a lost locker, sits and says, Sam.

“When I die,” he says, “I want you to…”

“What,” Sam says.

Once a girl, radiant, bright as blades, said Dean was like staring at the sun, or that’s the way one of them tells it, anyway.

Dean says, “When I _relapse_ , I want you to…”

“You’re gonna live,” Sam says,  _lux et veritas,_ not,"we'll find a way." _  
_

“Look at yourself,” Dean says, sets a hand on him, lets him feel it, what, convective; Sammy, early bird; ain’t no morning star, anymore.

“Yeah,” Sam says, “get some sleep.”

*****

"No, maybe," Dean mutters to the dark, rolls heavy over himself when Sam flicks on the light, like mulch-smoke. 

LA, pretty much, 4 AM, film rolled credits-first, phantom empire over and between and beneath the dry whisper of the hills. 

That's where the ghosts are, or just coyotes a-trotting the tracks; cemeteries, cement riverbed.

Here: eyelash-haunted pillows, a brother's arm unsheeted, seared, no offense to parking-lot neon.

The novelist, dark-browed and set up in the canyon, terracotta'd dill garden, caught Sam's hand for a second, said, you sure you don't want to unload some of those?

Secrets that is, failures, things to put a shine on, revise to remedy.

The bathroom mirror gives Sam his breakdowns, breakups, a bruise he hadn't seen, and bed won't take him back.

*****

Dean says he slept fine. Sam says he slept fine.

They shrug off the PM, roll up in the dark to give the accountant a salt-shower, say sorry.

There's short hush, in the flames after, micro-elegy for the duped and the shallow-graved, the wasted, the worn-out--

("Beancounters ain't no gunslingers," Joe said, "though I can't blame him.")

He comes out later, wiping his hands, for a take-care-of-yourself, rolls into Sam’s hands a vial of oil, amber, scented younger than he ever was.

“Works for me,” Joe says, “works out the kind of knots that can’t be, um, manhandled.”

“He’s kind of,” Janna says, does a new-agey handwave, “you know. Though yeah, you did just take out a ghost." 

Dean waits in the car, unrattled chain.They cut through the canyon to the novelist’s haunt (no living family, anymore, just the sepias in the hall, made-up daughters, chapters; only phrases, filaments, asphalt, warm bones, a stranger’s strange irises.)

They pick the lock. The cops have taken the laptop.

Sam goes to the seashelled sink, runs sea over his palms; looks, looks again.

*****

There aren’t any good angles here, are there, just refractions, inversions, veil-trapped particulates. Painted sunrise for suckers to ride out of.

“Breakfast?” Sam says, and Dean nods, though you can smell the nausea on him.

Sam brings Americano, plain toast. LA treats them to flamingo-melted-icecream-sidewalk-weed, allergened air, neon midday, orange peel, three near-accidents, a hearty traffic-chanted fuck you, oddfellows, glossy monuments, promise of straight-to-cable noir. Baby slews a little, after a light.

“You OK,” Sam says.

Dean’s wearing a citysuck sourpuss, his cheeks the color of smog.

“You feel alright?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “mostly.” Little tremor in his ring finger,sweat-stream, massive jam on the 10. 

Turn east, then.

Desert, then (not for temptation, nor for wandering), and home.

*****

The body, after all, remembers the way.

Knock off the part and you've got the whole, mesa and mitten-marked, that canyon you may not have been to.

Virgin and sinner, ink or no; stripped there's still the limb; apparition, phantom.

That is: a body's worth of wrath, or love.

*****

They drive, windows down. Sam at the wheel, the stop at nowhere, the switch.

Air’s like nothing out here, dust-nothing, to-what-we-return.

And nobody smells like living green, do they; demon-tracked, ghost-wracked, put-away-wet-possessed,cindered through, chemically-tagged  _revival_ ; shrouds, might as well be ghouls; that's them. They smell like fucked-up, reddish right hands, argent and lead and casketwood, exotic marrows; yeah, brimstone, mercury and unholy, wrong. They smell like they've kept each other dying, and well (jumped bolts so many times their rib-ends leak ozone), haven't they.

They smell like collateral, never-gonna-make-forty, ages envesseled and time no straitjacket, shifts and warps and buzzes and leaves you, cacti for rain, waiting; smells like dry apples, maybe, wasps, breath and hell, lack.

Sam looks down at his lap; Dean flips off the fading radio.

They drive, silent, into the desert. There aren’t any angels there.

"No water, either," Dean says, elbow-close, breath hot, Santa Ana coastward-bound, "it sure ain't the beach."

"Look at that."

"Not holding your hand," Dean says, though he almost is.

They're sandblasted, watching the sundown over Joshua, now and then and maybe forever;red-skied, not so much delight as go-west (for hope) and what-up Winchester, what next, hands in your pockets but not for long; there you are, there you are; o trail-cursed, o beautiful, blessed, you little scrub pine. 

**Author's Note:**

> "Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.” --James Ellroy


End file.
